Future Media

Wilber's solid anthology of short stories and academic essays successfully juxtaposes work both newer and timeless. Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" posits that Google has severely curtailed our attention spans; this is further developed by James Patrick Kelly's "New Brains for Old," a discussion of reprogramming our brains. An excerpt from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is paired with Gregory Benford's morbid book auction in "Centigrade 233." Allucqu%C3%A9re Rosanne Stone's "Sex, Death, and Machinery" mashes up a nonfiction essay with a fictional style, exploring technology and all of our relations to it. Few of the inclusions are new, but even the oldest stories and essays feel as though they could have been written yesterday but for some older-sounding terminology. Often deep, occasionally dense, and always thought-provoking, these works will appeal to both academics and lay readers. (Sept.)